


i love you like an alcoholic

by downpours



Series: projecting my issues onto klaus hargreeves [4]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - No Sparrow Academy (Umbrella Academy), Angst, Character Study, Emetophobia, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Klaus Hargreeves Whump, Major character death - Freeform, No Incest, Past Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, ben is gone for good, klaus and diego swear like sailors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:42:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27382876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downpours/pseuds/downpours
Summary: The room is spinning and Klaus is drowning in vodka vertigo. He fights the nausea to search frantically for Ben. Ben would ground him. He does this for what feels like hours before realizing that Ben can’t help him, because Ben is dead and Klaus will never see him again until he is too.Oh. It’s time for another shot.OR, In which Klaus’ alcoholism in Season 2 is actually addressed.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: projecting my issues onto klaus hargreeves [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980548
Comments: 5
Kudos: 137





	i love you like an alcoholic

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags for trigger warnings! Title is from the song by The Taxpayers. Season 2 really hinted that alcoholism isn’t as destructive as drugs and as I am drunk and currently shaking like a leaf, I'm taking personal offense to that. Also I’m still mad about the inexplicable 180 on Klaus and Diego's relationship in S2. Pretend there's no Sparrow Academy in this, they're back in the Academy and averted the apocalypse. Once again, read the tags, this isn't fluff.

_“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”_

_~ Charles Bukowski_

Klaus tells himself he’s having fun even though he’s had to use the shitter three times in the past half hour because his digestive system is so monumentally fucked. Klaus already has the shakes—and he hasn’t even approached sobriety yet. He’s drunk, he’s so _goddamn_ drunk, but he still doesn’t feel good. His skin feels feverish but he can’t stop shivering so hard he might strain a muscle. Maybe the next shot will taste better? Or the next one? _Oh god, he should’ve just hunted down an old dealer._ At this level of alcoholism, the harder stuff can’t be much worse than the booze. Maybe more vodka would drown this awful feeling.

It doesn’t, of course. But that has never stopped Klaus before. 

The next shot he slams back is swallowed with a hint of vomit. The room is spinning and Klaus is drowning in vodka vertigo. He fights the nausea to search frantically for Ben. Ben would ground him. He does this for what feels like hours before realizing that Ben can’t help him because Ben is dead and Klaus will never see him again until he is too.

 _Oh,_ he thinks. _It’s time for another shot_.

The thing about depressants is that they’re a double-edged sword. They turn the volume down on _everything_ , not just inhibitions. It’s fun when you can laugh and dance and fuck without a care, but soon you find yourself craving something other than the same poisonous apathy. Depressants strip the warmth away until you’re just another pathetic, numb, empty drunkard puking on the floor. 

Lately, Klaus finds himself regretting drinking more often than not. It’s never fun, it’s a necessary evil, but still, he just wants to  _ feel _ something again. He’s so empty and the alcohol only deepens that void. But he knows he’ll just repeat the cycle in the morning. The alternative — complete sobriety — is far more dangerous. Better to feel nothing than to feel one step away from running into traffic.  _ Well.  _ Marginally better, at least.

Klaus stares at the half-empty bottle and serenades it to the song playing through his headphones.

_ “One last kiss. _

_ I love you like an alcoholic. _

_ I need you like I need a gaping head wound.” _

He’s slurring. He’s in a level of drunken stupor that even Ben would furrow his eyebrows at. Ben would chastise him, make some snarky comment about how Klaus’ liver is deader than his own, and he’s  _ literally _ dead. Klaus thinks the dead jokes aren’t funny anymore now that his brother finally went somewhere he couldn’t follow. It’s cruel that his dead brother’s voice still taunts him even after going beyond the veil. He thinks he might hate Ben for leaving him.

_ "I need you like I need a broken leg.” _

Nobody living wants to follow around a morbid junkie.

“Klaus, man, what the fuck.” Diego states. Whoops. Guess he left the door open. Diego looks at his wasted brother and takes in the scene: his brother, slouched on his bedroom floor, long hair matted with grease, fingers gripping an empty bottle like a lifeline. Klaus rolls his head with a pained murmur before slowly looking up to face Diego. His eyes are watery and vacant, and his mouth lolls open wordlessly. He looks like death warmed over. “You look like shit.”

“Mmm. Feel like it too.” Klaus hums in response. 

“Are you high?” Diego accuses.

“Oh, how I wish I was,” Klaus laughs mirthlessly. “Just a few drinks.”

“You don’t look like a man who just had ‘a few drinks’, you idiot.”

“And you don’t look like you should be let out of a BDSM fetishist convention with that spandex getup.”

“It’s leather.”

Klaus just giggles, then frowns when he realizes his bottle is empty.

“I think you’ve had enough.”

"I think that you’re not my mom.” He drawls.

Diego sighs at his impossible brother and walks over to join him on the floor. Klaus used to be a lot harder to read, but lately, it seems like he’s given up on putting on a facade of “fine” beyond lazy one-liners. Anyone with half a brain cell could take a look at the drunk man and know he was far from okay. The issue was getting Klaus to admit that.

“You’re one wine cooler away from needing a stomach pump.”

“Good thing I don’t drink wine coolers.” He gestures lazily to the label on the bottle of vodka.

“Can you be serious?” Diego exasperates, “Jesus Christ. For once in your life! Just fucking once! I could be stopping a break-in or a mugging right now but instead, I’m on the floor with my asshole of a brother because he won’t stop poisoning himself and he won’t even tell me  _ why!" _

Klaus goes quiet and stares at a scratch on the floor. Finally, he speaks softly: “You won’t believe me.”

“Of course I’d believe you. You’re my brother.”

Klaus snorts. “Yeah, right, like that meant anything before.”

“What does  _ that _ mean?” Diego scoffs.

Now it’s Klaus’ turn to be a hothead.  _ Fuck it, _ he thinks, he’s drunk enough to overshare.

“You’re kidding, right?” Klaus laughs in disbelief. “You didn’t give a shit that I was your brother when dear Daddy locked me in the mausoleum for days before I even hit puberty. Or when I broke my jaw trying to off myself. Or when I needed drugs to prevent myself from attempting again — I needed them so badly I had to sell my own fucking body at  _ sixteen. _ Or when I got kidnapped and tortured for over a day! Or — ” Klaus takes a trembling breath, “ — or when I was sent to fight in the fucking  _ Vietnam War. _ Time travel's a bitch, by the way. You know how gory bomb deaths are?”

Diego looks like he just got punched in the gut. “I didn’t know all of that. Jesus. You d-didn’t tell m-me.”

“Oh, but didn’t I, brother dear?” Klaus drawls.

Diego thinks back to all those times Klaus would stumble home with hickeys littering his neck and a murmured comment about how many men are into the teen junkie aesthetic. He thinks about the days in which Klaus went missing as kids and they all assumed he was on another bender. He thinks about how he joked about the stairs incident, not knowing Klaus got his jaw wired because  _ he tried to fucking kill himself _ . He thinks about how he was more concerned about finding his 58-year-old brother than his baby brother who got kidnapped and tortured by trained assassins. He thinks about the veteran’s bar and how it made his happy-go-lucky brother cry like a baby.  _ In a Veteran’s bar, _ Diego thinks,  _ how did I not suspect something? _

“I’m so sorry,” Diego stutters. “B-but I’m here for you now. We can have a new b-beginning.”   


“I’d love that,” Klaus says sincerely, “And I know you haven’t had it easy, either. But the years of addiction and PTSD don’t go away that quickly, bro.”

Diego reaches out to remove the bottle from Klaus’ grip and then replaces it with his hand.

“I know. But…” Diego trails off. “I know I haven’t been a great b-brother, and hell, you haven’t always either, but I’d like to try to be better.”

Klaus gives a small smile in return.

“Okay. _Fine_ , I might be okay with that.”

**Author's Note:**

> this ending is lazy but if you enjoyed this I love comments with all my heart


End file.
